Depression: Using positive thinking

Depression is an illness that makes a person feel sad and hopeless much of the time. It's different than feeling a little sad or down. Depression can be treated with counseling or medicine, or both.

Positive thinking also can help prevent or control depression.

Guidlines

• If you have thoughts of harming yourself or others, you need to see your doctor or therapist right away. Positive thinking can help with depression. But you may also need medicine and therapy.
• Negative thoughts can make depression worse or can raise your chance of having depression.
• Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a type of therapy that can help you replace negative thoughts with positive ones.
• Changing your thinking will take some time. You need to practice healthy thinking every day. After a while, positive thinking will come naturally to you.

Positive thinking, or healthy thinking

Is a way to help you stay well by changing how you think. It’s based on research that shows that you can change how you think. And how you think affects how you feel.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, also called CBT, is a type of therapy that is often used to help people think in a healthy way. CBT can help you learn to replace negative thoughts with positive ones. These negative thoughts are sometimes called irrational or automatic thoughts.

Working on your own or with a counselor, you can practice these three steps:

• Watch. Notice your thoughts, sometimes called "self-talk." Some people don't pay much attention to what they tell themselves. If they happen to notice that they've told themselves they're a failure, they just accept that discouraging thought as fact.
• Check. Look at your thoughts, and ask if they are completely true. Ask yourself if these thoughts are untrue or exaggerated. Maybe you're ignoring something positive.
• Correct. Replace the negative thoughts with positive, helpful thoughts. This is the step where you can change the way you feel.

The goal is to have positive thoughts come naturally. It may take some time to change the way you think. So you will need to practice positive thinking every day.

Positive thinking important to help you cope with depression

Changing the way you think can help you replace negative thoughts with helpful ones. This can help you cope with depression and may help keep it from coming back.

Maybe you weren't able to close a sale or get a big project done at work. Or perhaps a relationship has ended. It's normal to feel down. But you've had trouble sleeping. You can't enjoy many of your usual activities. And you're blaming yourself. "I'm a failure at everything," you tell yourself.

The more you think about yourself in a negative way, the harder it is to feel hopeful and positive. The negative thinking makes you feel bad. And that can make you feel more depressed, which leads to more bad thoughts about yourself. It's a cycle that's hard to break.

But with practice, you can retrain your brain. After all, you weren't born telling yourself negative things. You learned how to do it. So there’s no reason you can't teach your brain to unlearn it and replace negative thinking with more helpful thoughts.

Positive thinking also can help you manage stress. Too much stress can raise your blood pressure and make your heart work harder, which can increase your risk for a heart attack. Stress also can weaken your immune system, which can make you more open to infection and disease.

Although you can use CBT on your own, it’s important to talk to your doctor or a counselor if you feel that your mood is getting worse. You may need more help.

By Marianne Flagg